Suspending the 18.4 Cents/Gallon Tax This Summer Sounds like a good idea, on the face of it. Cut the 18.4 cents-per-gallon Federal gas tax and customers will save roughly $2-3 each visit to the pump during the summer, right? What's not to like? Well, don't ask whether it makes sense to encourage burning more fossil fuel or whether we should raid the highway trust fund when bridges are collapsing. Think about how to lower gas prices to boost the economy.

At 11:00 a.m. today, the Senate Finance Committee announced a new tax title to the farm bill, complete with offsets. The timing is propitious, because the one-month extension of the farm bill expires today. But agreement with the House is still unlikely to come today. The tax expenditures in the new tax title, which come to a total of $2.406 billion, are as follows:

• Ethanol Package $1.226 billion
• Schedule F Loss Limitation $0.456 billion
• Optional Self-Employment Tax $0.124 billion
• Other Farm-Related Tax Reform $0.600 billion

"Pick on Someone Your Own Size!" The New York Times business section story today, Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays, addresses the fortunes of "[h]edge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, [who] are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street's rarefied realms," mentions that the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned a combined $29 billion, and goes on to quote William H. Gross, the chief investment officer of the bond fund Pimco: There is nothing wrong with it — it's not illegal... But it's ugly.

We all know we labor one third of our lives. Do we reflect on the fact that roughly one fifth of all our productive and economic lives involves taxation? Do we appreciate that the tax code is our industrial policy (shaped by corporate tax incentives)? That the code is also a moral code (the marriage penalty)? That it expresses our values and governs much of our social and spiritual lives (the charitable deduction)? That it orders and re-orders our society (the mortgage interest deduction and the trillions more in spending that it enables)?